


11.2 km/s

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Angst, Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist the Movie: Conqueror of Shamballa, M/M, Romance, Science, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-31
Updated: 2012-08-31
Packaged: 2017-11-13 06:30:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/500512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Parabolic motion is only the beginning.</p><p>[Major spoilers for 2003/Conqueror of Shamballa.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	11.2 km/s

**Author's Note:**

> So, uh, this was supposed to be cutesy Ed/Hei, and then it _really, really wasn't_. I felt so bad that I wrote [unrepentant fix-it fluff](http://archiveofourown.org/works/500514) to apologize to Alfons. XD Extra thank-you to Eltea for double-checking my extremely rusty physics. ♥

Strangely, Ed has nothing nosy or disparaging to say about Alfons’s new habit of begging freebies at the beer hall until he’s rip-roaring drunk. Stranger still, Ed joins in.

Ed has a fairly low tolerance for alcohol because of his reduced body mass—that’s just _science_ , after all—but he makes up some of the difference in sheer stubbornness. At times like this, Alfons can’t help it—can’t help _needing_ the reckless light in those remarkable eyes. Ed is brave and stupid and brilliant and impulsive and outspoken. He’s everything Alfons has never been, everything Alfons will never dare to be. Ed is the epitome of life, and Alfons is dying. Maybe he was always dead, and he only woke up to it on seeing how much Ed _wants_ from the world. Where Alfons whispers, Ed demands. Alfons wishes he could go out with a bang, but he’s read his Eliot.

Fascinating man, Eliot. Almost a scientist, in the way that he studies broadly and recombines.

They stagger home together, two halves of a strange being, a misshapen octopus with flailing limbs. Alfons loves the anatomical diagrams of the creatures skulking at the bottom of the sea. Physics and astrophysics and engineering—those are the sciences that sing to him, that beat in his blood and his brain, that wrap him tight in the cold clarity of mathematics and numerical _facts_ … but there’s a pocket in his heart for biology. Veins twine blue and red, phalanges taper, hearts pound, neurons flash like pyrotechnics. It’s art. If physics is life, biology is love.

So when he looks at Ed—Ed, who is seventy percent man and thirty percent breathtaking machine—everything else in the universe seems terribly small. Ed is both. Ed is everything.

Ed’s left arm wraps around Alfons’s waist as he sways, his ankles tangling as they step down onto the cobblestones. Alfons thinks _Never do that again_ and _Please do that forever_ ; thinks _Anything but you I could fight_. It’s not fair. It’s not _fair_. There should be a God, should be an arbiter, should be a being with veto power to look down on this moment and murmur _Alfons Heiderich will have years, decades, lifetimes left to catalogue the ways that faint light moves across Edward Elric’s face_.

Ed’s grip tightens, and Alfons’s chest contracts. He knows what comes next.

Ed holds onto him all the way through the coughing fit. Alfons is panting when it’s over, gasping for air; his diaphragm aches; his lungs feel battered. He needs to be held. This is so good. But he can’t give in to it; it’ll just hurt more when he has to let go—

“You’ve had that cough a damn long time,” Ed says. “A long damn time. A long time, damn.”

Alfons would like to smile. “I suppose I must be allergic to something.”

Ed grins, wolflike and wild and ethereal, a beautiful nightmare in the dark. “When did it start? Maybe you’re allergic to _me_.”

Ed _does_ wreak merry hell on his internal temperature, set his eyes to watering, and give him dry mouth. “Maybe I am.”

“Really, though,” Ed says, and every line of his face softens, and his miraculous eyes dart up and down as he tries to read Alfons’s expression. “Are you—are you all right?”

It’s so difficult to lie to Ed’s earnestness. “I—” Ed’s so drunk he can’t stand of his own power; he won’t notice a swift change of topic. “Have you ever felt as though—like there’s something buried in your chest, something huge and hot and awful, and you have to get it out to survive?”

Except that’s not a change of topic at all.

Ed smiles, and from up close, from mingling-beer-breath distance, Alfons can almost taste that smile’s bitterness.

“Yeah,” Ed says. “Figuratively, anyway, I guess. I dunno if I’d call what I did ‘surviving,’ in the end.”

Alfons’s heart beats. Their heels click on the cobblestones, a touch unsteadily. Ed’s hand has settled on Alfons’s hip; it soothes like _salvation_ , and it hurts like hell.

“There was this guy,” Ed says. “Back home. No, not a guy. This _bastard_. There was this bastard back home who drove me crazy, and then in my craziness I started to want him so much I couldn’t think straight. You know me. I get what I want, but it’s never what I bargained for.”

Somehow Alfons is still breathing. They’re so close to home; maybe if they arrive, Ed will stop mid-sentence, and the incompleteness of the narrative will erase everything that came before. If you don’t finish the equation, it doesn’t balance.

“He was like—he was _molten_. He was a sickness. Consumption. God, Alfons; he was a fever. Possession. I don’t know what the hell you’d call it. He was incinerating me from the inside, and I couldn’t _take_ it, and I told him—I went to his house and told him he was killing me, because it was true. It seemed like it was.” He looks at the sky, aimlessly, until he stumbles again. “Now it all feels like a stupid dream. I guess maybe it never mattered much in the first place, in the bigger scheme of things. Who cares, right? Made my choices, paid my dues.”

“But what happened?” Alfons asks. Ed’s never this effusive during the day, never this unguarded, never this honest. Odds are fairly good he won’t remember this in the morning, either—that the night will be a pleasant, blurry haze, and he won’t have any memory of prying his ribcage open and exposing his soul. This might be Alfons’s only chance. “What happened when you told him that?”

“He said ‘no,’” Ed says. “And then he grabbed my collar and pinned me to the wall and kissed me and kept saying _No, no, stop me, stop me now, I have to be better than this, if you don’t stop it now, we never will_.”

Alfons swallows. If… if they… he and Ed, if…

The walls of their flat are so thin, and Ed is so strong; they’d be audible; Alfons would gasp; Ed would laugh softly, with a rough catch to his voice, with his eyes alight—

“I told him he was being a coward,” Ed says. “I told him it was stupid to be scared of something that hadn’t even happened yet.” He draws a deep breath and sighs it out. “Except it’s not. He was right. That’s the thing I hate the most—that he was _right_ , after all that.”

They’ve reached their street. Alfons can see the flower shop; the sign is unintelligible in the dark. “How do you mean? Right about what?”

“It just tears you up,” Ed says. “It’s like swallowing a knot of knives, and you just end up bleeding, and you should’ve chosen to die at the start.”

“But he’ll be waiting for you,” Alfons says. “When you go back.”

Ed laughs, and it’s an ugly sound. “I’m not going back for _him_. I’m… I mean, he’s probably over the whole damn thing by now. He’s probably on his three-floozy-a-week schedule again—a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead, preferably in that order, I think it was. He’s greedier than Greed. And he’s too smart to waste time pining. Some people just need _someone_. It’s my own damn fault that I need _him_.”

“I don’t understand,” Alfons says as they reach the door and stop.

“One warm body’s as good as another to the more bastardly segments of humani—”

“No,” Alfons says. “I don’t understand how anyone could stop loving you.”

“It’s like gravity,” Ed says. “What goes up comes down. Love is just the opposite parabola. You fall for a while, and then eventually you climb back out of it.”

“Are you climbing?” Alfons asks.

“Damn it,” Ed says, patting at his clothes. “Where the hell are my keys? Do you have yours?”

His hand ghosts over Alfons’s arm, across his chest, down his thigh. Alfons isn’t breathing; he’s going to pass out right here on the street in front of the flower shop.

“Here,” he says, and a hand that does not entirely seem to belong to him fishes out the ring and pushes it into Ed’s too-warm fingers.

“You should be way drunker than this,” Ed says, fumbling to fit the key into the lock. “I swear, you Germans are something else entirely.”

 _Something other than your bastard-guy,_ Alfons thinks. _Something you don’t want._

 

 

Alfons lies on top of his bed with his hands folded on his chest. He has narrowed it down to three preferences.

He would prefer not to die before finishing his work.

He would prefer not to die before losing his virginity.

He would prefer not to die before telling Ed how beautiful he really is, how radiant, how terrifying, how powerful.

If Alfons can only have one of those things, he will choose the rockets. They’re the only thing in his life that’s wholly _his_.

 

 

He wakes from a dream of a boy who looks a bit like him, a boy with long brown hair and a red coat. He’s too nauseous to go back to sleep, but he doesn’t think he’ll vomit. A glass of water, maybe. A breath of air.

Ed didn’t kick his door quite shut. Alfons pushes it open gently; perhaps it’s disgusting that he knows the precise amount of force to apply to keep it from creaking. He tiptoes in and stands at the bedside.

Ed’s snoring quietly, tangled in the sheets. His hair is loose, his mouth is open, and he’s forsaken an undershirt again. He claims that the prosthetic makes them too much trouble, but late at night Alfons tends to suspect that Ed actually knows about Alfons’s feelings and is secretly a sadist.

Ed’s left hand is splayed on his stomach. Alfons wants to drag his fingertip along the knuckles, wants to learn the circumference of the wrist, wants to stroke slowly along the taut muscle of Ed’s abdomen and melt into the warmth. Ed’s always warm, no matter the day, no matter the season. He’s exothermic.

Alfons reaches across and gingerly touches the empty metal contraption at Ed’s right shoulder. Gingerly, gingerly, he lets himself trace the edge of the port, lets himself appreciate the truncated body that’s somehow so complete. He lets himself slide a little further. It tastes so sweet at first.

He draws the blanket up over Ed, inexplicable perpetual warmness or no. And Ed shifts and smiles— _smiles_ , softly, delightedly, no mischief, no derision, nothing hidden or restrained. That smile is a bayonet blade to Alfons Heiderich, because that smile is not for him.

Alfons kneels next to the bed. Ed’s elbow slips out from under the blanket; the smile fades peacefully; he settles and snores again. Alfons leans down and brushes his lips across the tiny patch of unprotected skin.

“Why can’t you just need _someone_?” he breathes.

 

 

Alfons spends the morning buried in books until he hears Ed starting to stir. When Ed’s door creaks, he lights the stove; over the sizzle of the sausage grease, he hears the water running, the water splashing, and Ed vituperating the water in several languages for being so cold. In the end, Ed staggers into the kitchen red-eyed and damp-faced just after ten. Alfons sets a plate in front of him as he collapses into one of the kitchen chairs.

“Thanks,” Ed says, and the hangover must be _vicious_ if he hasn’t fallen on the food within seven seconds of scenting it. “I hope I wasn’t too much of a dick last night.”

“No more than usual,” Alfons says, and he loves—the time left is too short not to face it; he _loves_ —that Ed hears the undertone and knows that it’s a joke. Most people seem to think that logical brains and funny bones can’t physiologically coexist.

“Did I babble?” Ed asks. He watches Alfons’s face, and Alfons turns away to do the washing-up even though his breakfast will get cold in the meantime. “Okay, I definitely babbled. Crap. I didn’t say anything offensive, did I? Or—worse—anything _stupid_?”

“You did go on a tangent about gravity,” Alfons says, scrubbing hard, scrubbing harder, and his knuckles scrape; “during the course of which you completely failed to acknowledge the most basic premise of rocketry.”

It’s more of a promise than a premise to Alfons, but he can’t say things like that aloud.

Ed sighs and hacks at a sausage with his fork. “That bad?”

“You talked about parabolic motion like it was the only kind there is,” Alfons says. “Don’t you remember that?”

“Not a word.”

“But it’s not the only kind,” Alfons says, curling his hands on the countertop, training his gaze on the dishes. “That’s the point. The point is that with enough propulsion, a projectile can reach escape velocity and ascend straight on through the atmosphere. The point is that if you can _achieve_ escape velocity, you go into orbit, and you remain in orbit, perpetually. Infinitely. I know you want to believe there’s… _something_ … out there in space, but I think it’s true that it’s a vacuum. I think it’s nothing but emptiness, not even atoms, not even sound. I think it’s a void. And an object that attains escape velocity will orbit the source of gravity forever, in silence, alone. The point is that what goes up doesn’t have to come down. The point is that if you go up high enough, you _never_ do.”

He turns. Ed’s sitting so still that Alfons can see the reflection of his face in his half-raised fork.

“Do you remember not mentioning that?” Alfons asks.

“I don’t remember anything,” Ed says.

Alfons can see him—can see him inverted and returned, like the image in the fork, home in his other world, wrapped up in the arms of his bastard-guy, trying to find Munich in his mind and whispering _“I don’t remember anything.”_

“Never mind,” Alfons says. “Forget it.”


End file.
